Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury by Paul Strohm (review)

Paul Strohm’s latest book is not just another biography of Chaucer. Ingeniously, Chaucer’s Tale (published in the UK as The Poet’s Tale: Chaucer and the Year that Made the “Canterbury Tales”) paints an enthralling portrait of the poet at the turn of the year 1386, when his public career as a controller of customs came to an abrupt end. The book’s argument is simple: as Chaucer’s faction in London (and at court) fell from grace, he lost his respectable city job and rent-free lodgings above Aldgate, prompting him to lie low in Kent for a while, where he diverted his energies to crafting the Canterbury Tales.

Along the way, Chaucer’s Tale yields a string of new glimpses into the poet’s private life and milieu: the fortunes of his wife Philippa at John of Gaunt’s court have rarely been delineated with greater clarity, Chaucer’s years over Aldgate will make readers reconsider the physical setting of the writing process, and his rustication in Kent and Christendom generates new points of departure for future studies of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s Tale is Strohm at his best. Most of the chapters are exercises in history writing, well beyond the literary histories charted by England’s Empty Throne or Politique, whereas the last section gives itself over to theoretical and, ultimately, literary considerations of audience, poetic authority, and literary tradition. Just as the book brings to life vignettes of political intrigue, graft, and subterfuge, Strohm sets up Chaucer’s Tale as the prequel to Social Chaucer, introducing an opportunistic and political Chaucer who is about to channel his real-life frustrations into a visionary literary experiment. To use Strohm’s own term, this book presents Chaucer as a situated writer, both politically and socially. Yet perhaps the time server who happened to be well connected and landed the sought-after lease of Aldgate, and who was summoned to parliament despite his modest social status, ought to be credited with more than passivity and having been in the right place at the right time. Chaucer may not have been visible enough to face punishment when his civic patrons climbed to their gallows, but to swim with the tide of Nicholas Brembre’s political machine without being sucked into the ensuing maelstrom may have been the result of a strategy of prudence on Chaucer’s part. Strohm’s Chaucer is political, but not too political.

For all its focus on the poet, Chaucer’s Tale is as much about London as it is about Chaucer. James Joyce once noted that Dublin could be rebuilt using Ulysses, and he claimed that he wanted “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”³ If Joyce’s exploration of June 16, 1904 through the urban meanderings of the unremarkable Dubliner Leopold Bloom is the ultimate microbiography of Dublin, then Strohm’s meticulous depiction of the civic backdrop for the equally unremarkable Londoner Chaucer does much the same for the London of 1386. Strohm presents a replica of late medieval London built to a human scale, where spiritual time is computed by the tolling of bells, and space is measured by the steps of the city walker Chaucer—a practiced space firmly situated in the premodern rituals of a city unimagined by de Certeau.

Grounded in the erudition of a scholar who has helped to redefine the practice of literary history, Chaucer’s Tale occasionally stops short of answering its own questions, or even asking questions that have been carefully set up: if Chaucer was Brembre’s man at parliament, how exactly did he escape repercussions later? And if, during his exile in Kent, Chaucer first conjured up the idea of a wide literary audience—prefigured by the social diversity of the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales—was this...